In Los Angeles, a stage set reproducing the cabin of a private jet rents for under $55 an hour, and it is booked around the clock. Around it, a complete supply chain for the lifestyle has been built: châteaux by the day, Lamborghinis by the half hour, photo cruises on the Seine, Rolexes handed over in the lobby of a luxury hotel. Not one of these companies deceives anyone, they publish their rates online, and that is exactly what makes the operation impossible to prosecute. What remains to be understood is why these accounts always declare the same handful of occupations, the ones nobody can audit, and how they guarantee one another a success none of them has the capital for. An inquiry into Potemkin influencers, and into what it says about a country that success can be rented there by the hour.
Techno-optimist discourse no longer promises tools. It promises deliverance: the end of disease, and then of aging itself. This essay does not try to say whether that promise will hold, but examines its shape, which borrows the grammar of religious eschatology. Noting the resemblance is not enough to discredit a claim, on pain of committing the genetic fallacy. What separates science from belief here is not the content of the promise but its relationship to evidence: what result, what failure, would make you give it up? One of the great forms of faith of our era is taking shape in front of us, and it is being written entirely elsewhere.
When a carmaker discovers a defective part, it issues a recall notice. France has never done so for its intellectual products. Yet Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze supplied the mechanisms that American campuses assembled into an identitarian war machine, with no manual and no safeguards, while their authors looked on, flattered. Forty years later the product is coming back to us by the containerload, and indictments are no longer enough. Here is the recall notice, and the warranty work starts now.